Einstein’s Unfinished Revolution

This is the story of the quest for TOE (The Theory of Everything) by Lee Smolin and his colleagues and predecessors. The two current theories that form the two pillars of modern physics are mutually irreconcilable, General Relativity is a deterministic theory. Einstein famously said that “God does not play dice.” Quantum Mechanics is a probabilistic theory in which particles owe their very existence to a throw of the dice. Both though very successful as predictive theories cannot by themselves present the correct picture of reality. Physicists since the time of Einstein himself are working hard to find a truly fundamental theory which is dubbed as TOE or the Theory of Everything.Many theories like String Theory and Quantum theories of gravity have been proposed in an attempt to resolve the problem but today the experiment that has brought Physics back to a turning point is the LHC (Large Hadron Collider). Steven Weinberg in the December 1999 issue of Scientific American wrote about the Higgs Particle in the following words :“ The very least new thing that will be discovered is a single.. particle. It would be a disaster if this were all that were discovered by 2020..” Then moving on to modern theories like SUSY and TECHNICOLOR (as popular today as luminiferous ether was in Michelson’s time) he wrote“All these ideas share a common feature: they require a zoo of particles.. If there is any truth to these ideas , then these particles should be discovered before 2020 at the Large Hadron Collider..”As none of these particles (except a single Higgs Particle) have been discovered yet then, if Weinberg’s words are to be taken literally , these ideas (SUSY,TECHNICOLOR, and String Theory) are perhaps in the same class as luminiferous ether. Lee Smolin in the last chapter of his book describes his feelings (the feelings of a contemporary physicist) in the following words:“ .. the only thing you learn is certain, as your fifties and sixties rush by, every day busy with a schedule full of seminars , faculty meetings , working with students ,classes , review panels ,airplanes, hotels and conference talks , is that you are not immortal.”

This is a very well-written and timely book on the current state of play in interpretations and proposed modifications of quantum theory. It is all the more telling because it is written by an expert on quantum gravity - not many quantum gravity experts think it is necessary to address foundational issues in quantum theory when seeking a quantum theory of gravity. Smolin correctly points out that a limitation of collapse models is that they do not make connection with quantum gravity. This is precisely the connection developed in my recent research `Proposal for a new quantum theory of gravity'. Smolin's easy to read book will be found useful and instructive by anyone interested in the puzzles of quantum mechanics, and their likely implications for the unification of relativity and quantum theory.

Good

The book covers some Interesting ideas

Absolutely Loved the book